


Lock and Key

by kedgeree



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Botched First Kiss, Botched First Kiss Recovery, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Memories in a Box
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 14:56:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1945443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kedgeree/pseuds/kedgeree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's mind is still spinning: John <em>kissed</em> him last night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lock and Key

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the LiveJournal 24-hour porn writing challenge for mildredandbobbin's excellent prompt "under lock and key." Except...it didn't end up all that porny. Sorry!

Sherlock sat cross-legged on the floor of his childhood bedroom, rolling a tarnished little brass-plated skeleton key between his fingers.

John Watson had kissed him last night. They had each been barefoot, for reasons Sherlock could no longer recall, and the grass was still damp from a gentle afternoon rain. The breeze smelled of his mother's camellias. Warmed and slightly unsteady with wine, Sherlock had shown John the periodic table he had carved into the brick wall at the back of the garden when he was nine years old. John had laughed and then, under a sky full of winking stars, John had kissed him.

"You've made a mess," John observed from the open doorway, startling Sherlock from his memories. His voice was tight and he was no longer laughing. He looked smaller than usual, tired and unshaven, shoulders slouched and hands stuffed inside his jeans pockets. Bundled in his oatmeal jumper even though it was a not a cold day.

Sherlock looked around the room with a frown. Judging by the slant of sunlight through his windows, it was early afternoon. A chaos of his belongings was strewn across the floor, with the trail starting at his cupboard as though it had rejected its carefully stored clothing, papers, and mementos in one great retch. Sherlock had risen with the sun after a restless, bewildered, and sleepless night and proceeded to spend the morning ransacking his own room.

John had kissed him, and Sherlock had frozen. Sherlock had _backed away_. Because… _why?_ _Why_ had John kissed him? Why had John kissed him _then?_

_Stupid_. He was so _very_ stupid. What did it _matter_ why? But it had been too late. John had gone.

"Yes," Sherlock said, "I have."

"What's that?" John nodded to the wooden box on the floor in front of Sherlock.

"Some of my things. From when I was a boy."

"Looks like a pirate chest." John's quirk of a smile was not echoed in his eyes.

"Father made it." Sherlock had fallen in love with the chest the moment his father had presented it to him. Beautifully-crafted, steel-framed rough oak with a bowed top and delightfully piratical brass-plated clasps and hinges. "He likes to work with his hands. Like you…in a way."

"Yeah. Well." John stuffed his hands further into his pockets, his gaze dragging along the floor. "Are you going to open it?"

"What for?"

"To see what's inside is the usual reason."

"I know what's inside."

"All right, then," John said wearily. "Sherlock. Look. This is…awkward and…I think I'm just going to take the train back into town."

Sherlock ran his thumb over the flattened ring of the key's bow. It had seemed much larger the last time he had held it. Before his hands grew so very big. When he was small and lonely, but before he realised he was small and lonely. When his heart was still wide open and curious and the world was filled with terrors and wonders that were put there just for him to discover. Inside the chest were, he supposed, the usual things a boy might have. "Me," he said. He wasn't _so_ very strange then, as a boy, was he? Nothing special after all, really. "I'm inside."

"Sherlock. Did you hear me? I'm going home."

_Field notes, in loose sheets and in leather-bound journals, from his daily studies in the woods and fields surrounding their home. Sealed tubes of soil and decaying leaves and pond water for experiments. Goose down and raven feathers. Tubes with Redbeard's hair and Lady Penelope's whiskers. Assorted animal bones. A tortoise shell._ Sherlock was a scientist. He wanted to catalogue John's smells. Hair. The nape of his neck. Armpits. Discarded jumpers. Pants. The small of his back. His fingers after he made breakfast. His fingers after he masturbated. He wanted to keep locks of his hair in test tubes.

_Maps of London, because one day it would be home._ The map of London he carried in his head was scattered with symbols: Bart's, where they met; Roland Kerr Further Education College, where they _knew_ one another; Baker Street, home. _Maps of the stars._ Yes, he had actually at one point studied the heavens. He learned how the planets moved. He learned that the earth spins round the sun but never gets to touch it. Why would he ever have expected the earth to touch the sun?

"Give my apologies to your mum and dad, OK?" John sighed in resignation, turning away.

_Circuit boards and computer chips._ I AM LOCKED, Irene Adler's phone had taunted him, _so_ infuriatingly. Locks and keys. The right codes, the right numbers. Sherlock didn't know the right words.

_Scores from concertos and sonatas and his own early efforts at composition. Violin strings and spent rosin blocks._ At night when he touched himself he thought of John and the sounds he made. The hum, in D, when he took his first sip of tea. The cry, C minor, if he was in pain. Could Sherlock tune him with his touch? What tone would his mouth on John's cock produce? What chords might John groan with Sherlock inside him? Sherlock would compose _symphonies_.

Lying in bed last night, he had fucked his own hand almost frantically to the memory of the sound John made just before the kiss—the breath of laughter into Sherlock's mouth. _John._ Sherlock came onto his belly, warm and sticky, biting his lip to keep quiet. He experienced several full seconds of bliss before he opened his eyes and remembered he was not with John, and he was still small and lonely.

"John," he called out, "don't go."

_A crude drawing of a brown horse standing under an apple tree._ It had been a gift from a girl at school. Just a simple girl—her name was Maribel and she had long, straight blonde hair—who'd been kind to him. For no reason at all. John might not always be _kind,_ exactly, but John thought he was _amazing_ and that was even better. "Please."

"Sherlock, god," John's voice cracked, "what do you _want_?"

_Bullet casings. The dog tags his father thought he'd lost._ Fearlessness. Bravery. As a child he'd thought they were the same thing. John had kissed him with no hesitation, no reservations, and Sherlock knew John wasn't a _fearless_ man. But Sherlock knew with a terrifying certainty that if he were ever in danger, it would be John who came for him. John would come for him. God, he wanted John to come for him. By his hand. At his command. He would do no less for John. He would do far more for John. He would do anything for John. He might even try to be brave.

"I'm sorry. I did it wrong," Sherlock said. His voice came out a whisper. "You surprised me. You always surprise me."

_Mycroft's first pocket watch, the one he thought he'd lost._ Well, he'd never claimed to be an _honourable_ man. _The set of vintage erotic note cards that Mycroft also thought he'd lost._ Whilst they'd been educational at the time, Sherlock had wrinkled his nose wondering at the appeal of such acts. Now he understood. Now when he looked at John, his mind dealt him a hand of those cards: John, blue eyes upturned, with his mouth around his cock; John, pinned half-clothed to the wall with his legs wrapped around Sherlock's hips; Sherlock spread open on his bed with John's tongue inside him. Draw a card: He would suck and swallow John's cock until he choked. Draw a card: He would blindfold himself and lie naked at John's feet until he felt semen stripe his face.

Well, he'd never claimed to be a _decent_ man. He would fold the entire hand and burn it, though, for one more kiss, or for John's hand in his, or for John's head on his shoulder as he drifted off to sleep. For one more look like the one John had given him before that kiss.

John turned back to him slowly, as though he had to force himself. He squeezed his eyes shut, and took a long breath before he spoke, just one word, "Sherlock?"

It had started like droplets of rain, sometimes tickling the back of his neck, sometimes stinging his cheeks, sometimes soothing him to sleep, this _feeling_ he had for John. The fall of rain had run into rivulets and the rivulets into streams that flowed through his body and washed his heart clean. He thought he would run dry, but the streams converged into a river, and the river emptied into the sea. He never meant to fall in love, and now his love for John was a fucking ocean.

Sherlock pushed his locked chest toward John.

"There's nothing extraordinary inside. But, John, it's yours to open." He caught John's hand and pressed the key into it, then did the bravest thing he had done so far in his life and looked up into John's eyes. The world was still full of terrors and wonders. " _All_ yours."

_Open it. Open me. Stand me up and stand up on your toes and kiss me again. And again. Let the seas rise up and let the earth spin into the sun. Love me._

John's fingers closed tight around the key.

 


End file.
